eggplant. and life.

I was doing so well updating my blog every other day or so.  Ah well, time to gather up the slack again. 

 the driveway leading past the College buildings to our house

 

In the market today, I bought an eggplant as big as Elijah's head!  I've never before cooked with eggplant.  It had always scared me, as a vegetable, because I knew that if it wasn't cooked or prepared correctly it could be a real, total, complete, inedible flop. So I've always been a bit wary of eggplant. But last week, there were no other vegetables to be found in the market.  No green beans, no green peppers, no carrots, no nothin'.  Piles and piles of eggplant everywhere. So I looked at the eggplant, and maybe the eggplant looked at me, and I decided that would have to be our vegetable for the week.  So I took it home, and did some reading, and didn't find too many interesting looking recipes - but the week before, our College cook, Nelson, had made a very tasty dish of eggplant to accompany the nshima and beans at lunch. So I asked him how he cooked it.  Nelson's cooking instructions are never very detailed, but I managed to come pretty close to replicating this time... and added a bit of garam masala for flavor... and it was nice! We've had it a couple times more since then and this week I couldn't resist buying the eggplant that was as big as Elijah's head.

 daddy reading to Elijah and Ketzia

I'm happy to report that we are all much healthier than the last time I wrote.  It's been a month of much bleh-ness which seemed to affect all 4 of us differently, but thankfully now it seems to be passing and we are all regaining our bouncy good health again.

 Elijah with a few of our students who came for dinner

The main problem with keeping up anything online-related recently, be it email or blog or whatever, is that the electricity has not been good.  We are regularly without power for an entire day, about 3 times a week.  On the days when the power is on, it's often too weak to run the internet.  So... the brief periods when the internet is actually working have generally been spent dealing with whatever is quite urgent, but not quite having enough time to catch up on everything!  Oh, wow, yet another part of our life which is dealt with by "crisis management"!

 Elijah was reading aloud to Ketzia - as soon as I got the camera out, he got embarrassed!

The kids are doing fabulously.  Elijah, now that he has fully recovered from the chest infection or whatever it was that had laid him low for more than a week, is back to being his normal "cheeky" self as they would say in Scotland.  He is full of energy and zest for living.  He loves the students, he loves his friends, he has never ever ever met a fellow human being he didn't like.  His vocabulary is literally expanding every day.  Some of his new words this week have been "hiya" (genuine 'weegie!  I'm so proud...), "go" (said firmly to the dog), "dog", "eye", "guava" etc.  He is making a marvelous attempt to say his own name AND.... we are so proud of this... he is also trying to say "zekomo kwam biri" which is "thank you very much" in Nyanja!  Wow!  Elijah has also just moved into his very own "big boy" bed.  We ordered a bed made for him at the carpenter's complete with a bed rail.  He is so excited about it.  I am so happy for him that he has moved out of that tired travel cot which he had completely outgrown!  Now he has a very comfortable place to sleep.  I hope this means his sleep will improve now.  :)

notice Elijah's pose here, completely relaxed in his camp chair leaning his head against the table!

Things are right busy around here, as they always are, but we are finishing up the final preparations for the Trust meeting next week.  Our Scottish house guests arrive tomorrow -- in fact, as I write this, David is in Lusaka overnight and will be bringing them home with him tomorrow sometime.  So I am on my own with the two children overnight, I think for the first time since Ketzia was born!  It's amazing how rather lonely the College feels when you realize that your husband is away overnight, the students are all gone for the weekend, Marjanne has been in Lusaka for a few days on business, and suddenly it's just me and my children in our house, and across the way Phil in his house, and on the other corner Jackson in his house (his wife and kids are away in Lusaka until tomorrow, too).  And we're the only ones here. And it's quiet.  It's a bit sad.  But I'm happy there's still men around to provide a feeling of security to the place.

P.S. Did you notice our new sofas and armchairs in these photos??  Yes, the very ones that we spent 4 weeks trying to obtain!  They're HERE!  And we're so thankful to finally have adequate seating in our living room... especially since we're about to have a houseful of people for quite a while!

bleh.

Elijah was without a fever for another 24 hours and then during the night last night it came back for the 4th time in a week.  So this morning we took him back to the hospital to be checked out.  The pediatric doctor (a nice friendly girl from Edinburgh!) listened to his chest and said that he seems to have a chest infection.  She prescribed him an antibiotic and hopefully from here on out he'll be on the mend.  Later in the afternoon he perked up a bit and was playing around the house again, which was good to see.  Poor little guy, this is the first time since he had his "well baby" check up at 6 weeks old (the stupidest thing ever... why should I take my perfectly healthy child into a germ-ridden doctor's office so he can be poked and prodded and then proclaimed healthy and I can be patronized and treated like an imbecile first-time mother in the process?) that he's ever been to a doctor AND the first time he's ever been on an antibiotic!  Sniff.

Ketzia has developed a cough, too, and is full of sniffles.  I'm keeping a close eye on her and we're praying that she fights off this bug before it gets any worse.

An excerpt from an email to my mom tonight: "David and I are both utterly exhausted but, as usual, we're just frantically shifting from one urgent thing to the next, and every day is as frantic and packed full as it can possibly be.  Nothing is simple... for instance, this afternoon David went to take off the canopy from our truck bed so that he can pick up furniture on Monday. In the process (which should be a simple matter of unlatching and then lifting up the canopy and setting it down on the ground) he discovered that the truck company wired the rear brake light on the canopy through the canopy, so in order to remove the canopy he had to cut the cables and he will have to reattach them with electrical tape later!!  What should have been a few minutes' work turned into more than an hour.  Also we've discovered there's a problem with the plumbing in the guest room so now we have to get the plumber to come Monday morning... and our guest is arriving Monday night!" 


There's more, trust me, there's lots more.  But I will stop there.  It's been a really hard, distressing week in a lot of ways.  It's tempting to let it all get to me, become overwhelming.  But that wouldn't be living in faith according to the truth of Psalm 46 which we've been dwelling a lot on recently: "God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble... the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge."  There is much to take comfort in there!  And a very timely reminder that people will fail us and we will be faced with many difficulties, but in the midst of it, we should "be still and know that He is God."

another hospital experience

Elijah's been sick most of this week.  It started on Saturday afternoon, when we could tell he was obviously coming down with something -- fever, nasty cough, and runny nose.  That day I happened to have a fever, too, so we didn't think much of it.  We spent Sunday sick as a family because by then David was feeling unwell, too.  There's been a virus going around (fever, coughing, etc.).

And on Monday Elijah was up and running around again, his normal happy healthy self, and I thought he was over it. 

But then on Tuesday his fever came back and he spent the whole day sick again.  The good thing about Elijah is that he is marvelous about being sick -- he just completely mellows out, and lies down and lets the fever do its job.  He sleeps when he is sick.  He rests and lets his body fight.  I made him a pallet on the living room floor out of my yoga mat and a soft, cool, satiny blanket and his special pillow.  He liked lying there because the tile floor was cool and refreshing and he was still in the middle of the action, so when he would awaken from his feverish stupor Mama was always right there to reassure him. 

Then yesterday, Wednesday, he woke up again cheery and back to his normal self, no fever.  He took a short walk with me to the Farm to buy eggs, and on the way there he carried the empty egg tray and on the way back he carried the change from my purchase.  We ate lunch with the students, as usual, and later in the afternoon he saw his friends, too.

But today the fever returned suddenly and he was miserable all morning.  You could tell he felt so, so sick.  We were monitoring his temperature, as we always do, and watching it slowly rise.  At some point, since this was the third day of fever in 5 days, we decided to test him for malaria, even though he had no symptoms except fever.  Coughing and runny nose don't point to malaria, just a virus or flu of some kind.  The malaria test was negative, thankfully.  But then a couple hours later, his temperature was over 103* F, and that's when all the books tell you to go to the doctor (if they are under 3 years old).  So I called our doctor friend in Lusaka, Christine, to ask her advice.  Should we go to the more local hospital, an hour away, or did she think this was serious enough to come to Lusaka for the weekend and get Elijah more thoroughly checked out?  She recommended that we go to Katete and ask for blood tests to check his white blood cell count, and check his chest and lungs.  So in the midst of giving Elijah Calpol (Tylenol) and sponge-bathing him and giving him a lukewarm bath to bring down his temperature, we packed up the kids and the diaper bag and the water bottles and anything we might need for a long afternoon in a crowded hospital, and headed out immediately.  On the way to the hospital, I continued to monitor Elijah's temperature and it had come down as a result of our fever-reducing actions, which was encouraging.

We got to the hospital in the middle of a torrential downpour and despite having two umbrellas we still managed to get thoroughly drenched walking from the truck!  As we reached the front door of the clinic, surrounded by a deafening African rainstorm, David turned to me and said, "You know what? It's a public holiday.  I hope they're open!"  (I have written about our previous experience at this hospital here.) We opened the door to find... they were indeed closed.  Check-in was closed but at least there was one nurse inside to evaluate incoming patients and he told us they were still accepting people who needed to be admitted.  There was only one nurse/doctor on call and there was a small group of people waiting to see him, one by one.  We explained the situation with Elijah and the nurse said there was nothing he could do for us unless we wanted to have Elijah admitted.  The lab was closed, everything was closed.  I think we agreed pretty quickly that there was no reason to admit Elijah.  At the moment he was much more comfortable and his fever was very mild.  So we got the name and number of the nurse who helped us, in case we have to return tomorrow morning, and trudged back out through the downpour to our truck, and came home.

Elijah is now asleep in bed and we hope that he feels better when he wakes up in the morning.  When we laid him down his fever was under control but it was obvious he was still not feeling 100%.  Hopefully after a night of rest he will be okay.  If he isn't, we will take him back to the hospital.  Neither of us were concerned that this is anything serious, we just felt it was better to be safe then sorry and to take action when his temperature rose higher than is safe.  But what we both find unbelievable is that on a Zambian public holiday, they close the hospital.  What, so sick people take a holiday from needing doctors?  What irony, that on "International Women's Day" we should close the hospitals so that more village women can die without proper medical attention.  I am relieved that they at least were still allowing people to be admitted if necessary, but still that seems (to me) like saying, "Closed today, come back when you're dying."

home life

 

L to R: Enoch, Marjanne, Elijah, Nathan, Asher

Elijah has a FABULOUS time playing with his new friends.  I am amazed at how well he keeps up with them considering he's not even 2 years old yet and they are all 4 years old or older!

a few of the students teaching Elijah how to "slash" the grass

Elijah showing off our new dining table and chairs

our happy, sweet little girl

blurry, but you can see how well she can lift her head/shoulders and her legs now! rolling over is next...

what Ketzia sometimes does (usually while I'm trying to make dinner)

how I cope with making dinner + 2 small kids...

update

The snake which bit Marjanne was sent to the Zambian Wildlife Association in Petauke to be identified and they told us it was a cobra.  We are very thankful that it was a small cobra because otherwise the bite could potentially have been fatal.  Marjanne's leg remains severely swollen and painful and she is still unable to walk.

Meanwhile, Nelson the cook/handyman was attacked by a mamba while he was in the College kitchen.  Thankfully he was wearing very heavy boots which prevented him from being bitten even though the snake struck several times!  We are unspeakably grateful for the evidence of God's mercy and protection over us in the midst of these dangers.

I now have the theme music of "Pride and Prejudice" as my ringtone.  Very cool...

I also have a fever and I've been feeling ill all day.  David and Elijah are starting to act under the weather, too.  I think there may be a virus going around as several others have been ill with fevers, etc. in the past couple of days.  David and I have been plugging away today trying to wrap up our February newsletter which needs to be sent out ASAP!  It's not the easiest thing to compose when your brain is addled by fever and you're so achey that life almost seems unbearable.  Blah.  Hopefully you'll see this newsletter in your inbox soon!

This week we got the dining table and 8 chairs which we ordered from the carpenter in Petauke.  It is so nice to have some proper furniture in our living area at last. :)  Funny, there was not a tablecloth to be found in all of Petauke!

And hopefully, Lord willing, next week we will be able to pick up our new sofas (new to us anyway)!  It has been such a logistical challenge getting the details of purchasing and transporting these sofas worked out... but I'm happy to say that it looks like it might all be coming together at last.

And last, but not least, we will be hosting Nell from http://namesacrossnations.blogspot.com for a few days in the middle of this month as she will be trying to obtain cultural information about Zambian names.  This is the first time that I've arranged to meet, in person, someone from one of the blogs I've followed, and it's rather exciting!

snakes

Last night something very frightening occurred.  Our colleague, Marjanne, was bitten by a snake.  She was walking from her house to the generator shed to turn on the generator because the power had just gone out (this was around 7:30pm, after dark) and was bitten by a very small black snake.  Thankfully there is another girl, Jeannette, staying in the same compound just now and Marjanne screamed to her to come help.  Jeannette killed the snake and then rushed Marjanne to the hospital in Petauke (about 25-30 minutes drive away).  They took the snake along for identification but no one has been able to identify what kind it is yet (it's always so difficult when they are still very small). Marjanne was bitten on the foot, near her toes and when she returned from the hospital her foot was already very swollen and the swelling was beginning to spread up her leg also.  She was in a lot of pain all the way up her leg to her hip, but not having any other problems, thankfully.

She told us that when they reached the hospital in Petauke, the people said, "Well, you shouldn't worry now, because if it had been poisonous you would be dead in 30 minutes."  By this time 45 minutes had passed since she was bitten!  Poor Marjanne had never realized until that moment how much danger she was in.  When she was first bitten she did not think it was such a big deal and even went walking around afterwards!  We are so very thankful that even though it appears the snake that bit her was venomous (based on her body's reaction to the bite) that apparently either there was not much venom injected or else it was not a highly poisonous snake.  While what the people at the hospital said can be true (in worst case scenarios, if you are bitten by a cobra or mamba you can easily die in 30 minutes) it is more common that you will die within an hour or more.  The problem with what they said is that just because you have survived 45 minutes after a bite does not mean that you are out of danger!

Anyway, the power was out in the town so they examined her by candlelight.  Marjanne, being a missionary first and foremost and not being very concerned about the situation, told Jeannette to take a photo of them treating her by candlelight!  She told me afterwards that she was thinking, "Now, this will make a good story for my next newsletter!"  The funny thing was, the people at the hospital didn't even check her vital signs!  They didn't monitor her heart rate or her blood pressure or anything.  They just looked at the bite, looked at the swelling... and gave her a steroid injection and a tetanus shot!  They also prescribed her painkillers and antibiotics to take.  But of course there is no antivenin available here so that was all they could do!

By the grace of God Marjanne seems to be okay and she has escaped death.  She did not get much sleep last night because of the pain in her leg, but she is resting a lot during the day.  Her leg is now swollen up to her hip and still extremely painful so that she cannot walk on it.  However, the swelling is not spreading any further and she is still exhibiting no other symptoms.  She is very cheerful, all things considered, and seems to be doing just okay other than the swelling and the pain! 

But you can imagine that this has left all of us considerably shaken. This is the first time in about 4 years that anyone here at the College has been bitten by a snake, but it could easily happen again.  We have so many highly poisonous snakes around here (cobras, black mambas, puff adders, etc) that it is very frightening to think how close death has come.  Also the size of the snake which bit Marjanne has concerned us.  It was so small that you would likely not see it in the grass before you stepped on it!  When you combine these thoughts with the knowledge that we are far from adequate medical care and that the closest place where antivenin is available is Lusaka -- five hours' drive away -- these things are all very worrying. We have been told that buying antivenin will cost 1.5 million Kwacha per dose (close to 200 GBP) but I think in the future we will try to keep some on hand here at the College because otherwise we are risking people's lives.

Also, after she was bitten Marjanne was trying to phone all of us to let us know what had happened.  The mobile phone signal has been so bad recently that she was unable to reach anyone for a long time!  Again, in the event of an emergency this is so concerning that we are not able to phone each other because the network is down. We do not live within earshot of each other.  I think we are going to look into purchasing walkie-talkies in order to facilitate emergency communication between staff members since the phone network is so unreliable.  There are a lot of things to consider so that we are prepared for an emergency like this in the future.

Please, please be praying for the Lord's protection to be upon our family, our colleagues, and all the other staff and students and their families here at the College.  It is sobering to think of how many dangers surround us here in this fairly isolated area, away from adequate medical facilities.  So please pray not only for Marjanne's continued healing, but for protection and wisdom for the rest of us! ...and also that we would not be tempted to live life in fear.

bees

We had a large nest of bees in our roof (between the iron roof and the ceiling board) at the end of the house and they were really becoming a problem.  They were aggressive and even stung one of the children who was playing at our house last week.  This type of bee is dangerous -- they are so-called "African killer bees" because when they get angry they will swarm and aggressively sting a person and can easily kill someone.  So we needed to get rid of the hive quickly and asked Nelson, the handy-man, to help us.

So, armed with a bottle of Doom (bug spray), Nelson and a student named Kennany brought a ladder over after dark on Tuesday (around 6:45pm) to start the job, and David joined them.  They waited until after dark because the bees are more docile at night.  The plan was that they would spray Doom into the roof to kill the bees, then remove the iron sheet from the roof and clean out the hive.  First, when they went up the ladder, it snapped and collapsed under them!  Thankfully no one was injured and it was only the bottom portion of the ladder which snapped off, so the rest of it was usable and just barely reached our roof.  Then, when they sprayed Doom into the roof and lifted the metal sheet, the bees were not dead yet and began swarming angrily.  

I was inside the house with Elijah and Ketzia, having just given Elijah his bath.  He was playing around the house and winding down for bed.  Suddenly I heard the bees in the roof -- they were so loud it sounded like they were roaring the whole length of the house.  I immediately thought, "That doesn't sound good..." and I was just starting to grab Elijah when David came rushing into the house and said "You should get under a mosquito net so you don't get stung!"  He checked the back bedroom (over which the hive was located) and it was FULL of angry, swarming bees so he slammed the door shut.  I scooped up Elijah and Ketzia and took refuge on our bed under the mosquito net, bringing Elijah's portable DVD player with me so that he would be willing to sit still!  We lay low for a while.  Some bees found their way into the house but thankfully most of them were contained in the back bedroom. 

Slowly the Doom took effect, and eventually the men were able to start scooping dying, drugged bees into a large bucket.  They emptied the hive and collected all the honey (which was sprayed with Doom, but the Zambians said that they would boil it and eat it anyway... not sure what I think about that!). 

Amazingly, in the middle of everything, Elijah fell asleep and I put him into his own bed... and he never even stirred when the men nailed the roof back on!  Thankfully even though the bees were angry, Nelson and Kennany only received a few minor stings on their hands and David didn't get stung at all.  Now I am trying to air out the back bedroom so that I can furnish it for the guests coming to stay with us later this month!